Some surface commentaries have hailed Butcher’s Crossing as the better “hit” novel. But more pertinent in this great literary western is the need to acknowledge John Williams’ focus on the ideology of nature in Butcher’s Crossing, which merits only a digression in the smidgen of present coverage, as originally blogged in my publication for The Conversation.

With the anticipated publication of Justin McGuirk’s Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture, this blog post carries an earlierfocus of mine on Mike Davis’Planet of Slums, which was previously published in the journal Capital & Class. While awaiting the arrival of my copy of Radical Cities, I thought it worth revisiting some of the issues raised here on the dynamics of urbanism, spatial organisation, and uneven development in the ‘Global South’, which are also linked to an associated earlier blog post of mine on David Harvey’sRebel Cities. The purpose of the review, then, is to begin tracing a dialectical chain that might connect planet of slums—to rebel cities—to radical cities.

‘The vast shanty towns of Latin America (favelas, barrios, ranchos)’, argues Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space, ‘manifest a social life far more intense than the bourgeois districts of the cities. This social life is transposed onto the level of urban morphology, but it only survives inasmuch as it fights in self-defence and goes on the attack in the course of class struggle in its modern forms. Their poverty notwithstanding, these districts sometimes so effectively order their space—houses, walls, public spaces—as to elicit a nervous admiration.’ It is, perhaps, with a similar sense of such nervous admiration that in Planet of Slums, Mike Davis has turned his attention to the spatial explosions evident in the growth of slums that mark late twentieth-century capitalism in the so-called ‘Third World’. At the same time, he also advances an excoriating critique of the neoliberal inequalities at the heart of urbanism in the ‘Third World’ to reveal the burdens of underdevelopment and industrialisation carried by the urban poor. The result is a compelling and disturbing read.

As reblogged from the Journal of Australian Political Economy blogspot, I noted that some time ago Tony Cliff developed a theorisation of deflected permanent revolution to consider how state power, notably in post-colonial conditions of uneven and combined development, becomes the driver for capital accumulation. One result was the deflection of permanent revolution as the means of socialist transformation from bourgeois rule. This built on Leon Trotsky’s work ‘The Permanent Revolution’ where he wrote of ‘the inner connections’ linking the theory of permanent revolution, or the revolution in permanence, to states that experience ‘belated bourgeois development’, especially colonial and semi-colonial states.

With continued ability to surprise, Subcomandante Marcos, the enigmatic, masked spokesperson of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), announced this week in a communiqué his final words. The message was that he would cease to exist and that the chief spokesperson of the EZLN henceforth is Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés. The communiqué, entitled ‘Between Light and Shade’, is the latest crucial statement on the struggle of the Zapatistas and offers a glimpse into some of the key transformations of the movement. It also raises a number of questions. Has Marcos stood down from the EZLN? What is evolving in terms of the Zapatistas’ struggle for autonomy, for dignity, for indigenous rights, and for humanity against neoliberalism?

In my research on the Monument to the Revolution, as one of the foremost commemorative spatial sites of state power in Mexico City, I have previously written on For the Desk Drawer how it is a significant architectural form and a profoundly ambiguous carrier of utopian promise. Completed on 20 November 1938 the monument has served, on one hand, as the stage for official ceremonies remembering and honouring the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and its heroes ever since. On the other hand it is also a space that invokes a redemptive dimension of collective resistance. Beyond the recognition of state and class power, the Monument to the Revolution is a meeting place for transformational politics, including social movements from students, workers, and campesinos in contesting the site as a social space. The Monument to the Revolution is therefore an ambiguous carrier of utopian promise because it is both the spatial base for honouring and remembering the “heroes” of the Mexican Revolution and for collective contemporary resistance against state and class power in Mexico. Most recently, I have come across the work of Thomas Kellner that captures the contradictory dynamics of the Monument to the Revolution in a new and original form. Why might this be interesting in thinking about monuments; the triumphal procession of the victors in history; and attempts to establish a tradition of the past?